I am going to skip the "Suggestions for things that will be fun" and go out on a limb, possibly by myself.

Perl is a great language to stimulate a "problem solving" mentality. What tool (command) is best to get this part of the job done? And problem decomposition recognition, break big tasks into smaller ones. Or finding ways to generalize a solution to be useful to a class of problems.

But all of these are more in the realm of "System Engineering" as opposed to "Software engineering". I am not saying that most people in this field don't wear both hats in differing proportions most of the time.

At 14, Perl is fine to see if it stimulates the needed personality traits of the latent programmer. But down the road there are a lot of fundamental concepts that need to be understood in a more rigorous fashion, such as parameter passing methodologies, memory management (allocation, freeing, and reference counting), and other low level foundational concepts.

My progression was FORTRAN(no number), ALGOL, SNOBOL, early PASCAL,CDC Asssembler, COBOL, PL/1, REXX, 6502 & 68010 assembler, C, C++, (dropped JAVA), and now PERL

It is always better to have seen your target for yourself, rather than depend upon someone else's description.

In reply to Re: Perl as an intro to programming by Wiggins
in thread Perl as an intro to programming by jrsimmon

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.